Michael K. Williams, Omar From ‘The Wire,’ Is Dead at 54
Michael K. Williams, who also starred in Boardwalk Empire and Lovecraft Country, was best known for his role as Omar Little in The Wire.
As the gay, shotgun-toting Omar Little robbing drug dealers to give to the poor, Michael K Williams was Barack Obama’s favourite character in The Wire.
“That’s not an endorsement,” said the president. “But he’s a fascinating character. The toughest, baddest guy on the show.” He went on to call The Wire “one of the best shows of all time”.
Williams threw himself into the morally ambiguous role with unbridled enthusiasm as he walked the mean streets of Baltimore like a latter-day Robin Hood, whistling Elmer Fudd’s “A hunting we will go” with a cigarette dangling from his mouth and a sawn-off shotgun in his hand.
“He was more than somebody who went around killing people. He had morals, he had character, he was honest,” Williams said. “Omar said what he did, and he did what he said. That’s a rarity in human society. I love my characters. I play them with 100 per cent honesty; there’s no holding back. I understand where they are coming from.”
Delivering many of the shows best-known lines, such as “a man gotta have a code” and “all in the game, yo, all in the game” with a menacing charm, Williams played the part with such relish that his own life started to resemble something from the show. When he was first cast he found a drug dealer who taught him how to use firearms. Fans called him “Omar” in the street and he began to answer to the name. He also became addicted to cocaine and was evicted from his home.
As the distinction between reality and his character became increasingly blurred, he found himself looking in the mirror and no longer recognising who was looking back. He had forgotten that playing a part was “what I do, not who I am”.
Desperately seeking help for his addiction he stumbled into a church in New Jersey. “I was broken. I was on drugs,” he said in 2016. “I was in jeopardy of destroying everything I had worked so hard for.”
Determined to give something back, he became an ambassador for the American Civil Liberties Union’s “campaign for smart justice” and launched Making Kids Win, a charitable organisation building community centres in neighbourhoods lacking safe spaces for children.
He also earned an Emmy nomination for the 2018 documentary Raised in the System, which examined juvenile justice and why American jails were filled with drug offenders and people with mental illnesses whose issues were health-related rather than criminal.
“I use my job to engage empathy and compassion for people society might stereotype or ostracise,” he said. “No one wakes up and says ‘I’m going to become a drug dealer’. There is a series of events that makes them feel this is the only way out. As a black man growing up in the hood, I bear witness to some of those events.”
He had the scar to prove it, the result of a fight outside a bar in the early 1990s when he was slashed with a razor. He credited the facial scar for his breakthrough into acting, making him a natural in what he called “thug roles’‘. Yet his thugs were invariably charismatic, a combination of brutality shot through with flashes of tenderness, from the 1920s bootlegger “Chalky” White who he played in the HBO series Boardwalk Empire to the gangster Neville Baraka in the 2014 remake of The Gamble.
“I will not allow Hollywood to stereotype or to desensitise my experience growing up in the hood,” he said. “This is my job as an actor, to show the integrity, to show the class, to show the swagger, to show the danger, to show the pain, to show the bad choices.”
He was not married but was understood to have been in a relationship with the actress Tasha Smith. He is survived by a son, Elijah Anderson, an artist and illustrator.
Michael Kenneth Williams was born in Brooklyn, New York City, in 1966, the youngest of ten children. His mother, Paula, was a seamstress who came from the Bahamas and brought him up after his father Booker T Williams left and returned to South Carolina, where his ancestors had once been slaves.
He said he had been molested as a boy and suffered low self-esteem. After dropping out of school he developed a drug addiction and frequented the New York clubs, where his dancing caught the eye. By his early twenties, he was appearing in music videos and on tours with George Michael and Madonna.
After training with the National Black Theatre Company he made his movie debut as a henchman to Tupac Shakur’s drug kingpin in Bullet (1996). Shakur cast him without an audition after seeing his photo, hence Williams’s claim that he owed his career to his scars. He went on to appear as a drug dealer in Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead (1999). There were also appearances in episodes of The Sopranos and Law & Order and a cameo in the Grammy-winning 12 Years a Slave (2013).
In many of his roles he drew upon his experience. “My neighbourhood was very violent, a lot of murder, a lot of drugs, and I fell prey to some of that,” he said. “It wasn’t until the arts found me that I found something I was good at that held my attention. The arts saved my life.”
- Michael K Williams, actor, was born on November 22, 1966. He died of a suspected drug overdose on September 6, 2021, aged 54
The Times
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